From the PDHPE classroom to history, science and beyond, teachers at Queenwood School are working to raise the bar in discipline-specific writing skills – and an instructional framework is paving the way.

In the age of AI, Queenwood sees good reason for doubling down on efforts to bolster students’ writing skills, Head of English Dylan Chalwell says.

Head of English, Dylan Chalwell, says while the English classroom is an obvious place for students to improve as writers, it definitely should not be the only context.

“We really believe, (and) the research suggests, that writing across subjects is very helpful for students literacy skills, but also it strengthens their engagement with content within each subject.

“So, it’s kind of a win-win there,” Chalwell tells EducationHQ.

The project has since flourished, the educator reports, with 25 teachers now upskilled in how to impart the unique writing techniques of their subject.

“The form of a science report is very different to an English creative writing task, and students kind of get that, but sometimes the boundaries are a bit less clear.

“The demands of a history essay are different to the demands of an economics essay…” Chalwell notes.

Without delving into NAPLAN data, Chalwell says the initiative has been highly successful in lifting the profile and importance of writing across the board, with ‘pleasing improvement’ showing up in students’ punctuation, cohesion and sentence structure.

“It’s not always linear, but at the moment we have seen improvement in those areas.

“Then there’s the non-quantifiable [data] on the ground, which is hearing students say things like, ‘oh, we’ve already done complex sentences in PDHPE’, which is fantastic to hear.

“That’s actually a good thing in our eyes, because I think for the framework to work, you have to get students to a point where they’re so familiar with terminology like complex sentences, simple sentences, compound sentences…”

Sentence construction is something NAPLAN results suggest remains a challenge for Australian secondary students, the teacher flags.

“This is another part of the framework: trying to really upskill and build capacity for teachers to offer sentence-level instruction, and also to provide opportunities for students to be writing really strong sentences.”

In the initial stages of the project, before Chalwell came to the NSW school, a smaller in-house teaching team was the first to receive ‘really rich’ professional learning via a series of seminars run by AERO in writing instruction.

This equipped the group to become writing experts within their own subjects – a badge Chalwell says many secondary teachers might not have considered to be part of their role.

“It’s tough because people become a teacher in their subject area because they’re passionate about it.

“So sometimes, we need to program in time for writing, even once people have recognised the advantages of it,” he says.

On this front AERO’s framework offers more than just a list of strategies to work through, he adds.

“Even though the strategies are extremely helpful, it’s really about building capacity and through that trying to build a school culture [around writing].”

In the age of AI, Queenwood sees good reason for doubling down on efforts to bolster students’ writing skills, the teacher says.

“I think reading and writing is always going to be key to understanding and thinking about our world…

“Firstly, language is a meaning-making tool, and so we want students to be making meaning effectively in each subject they are in.

“Secondly, we know that writing well really helps students to get thinking; it strengthens their ability to synthesise information, to bring ideas together, to discover nuance.”

While AI might deliver a similar end-product, it denies students the chance to go through this cognitive process, Chalwell says.

“And for broader purposes, beyond school when they graduate and leave, I think in the workplace we’re still going to see the value of writing with clarity and expressing ourselves with precision…

“And writing well is such a key way to thinking clearly about the complexities of life and the world around us.”

As a NESA report into teaching writing has warned, a strong public policy focus on literacy over recent decades has focused largely on reading instruction at the expense of writing.

“It is not clear why writing has not been accorded greater importance. Writing is complex. The cognitive processes are awesome in their complexity,” the report states.

“To write well requires a simultaneous control over a wide range of cognitive and social aspects related to language, content and communicative intent.”

Even for teachers who are themselves great writers, we should not expect writing instruction to come naturally, it argued.

”Before setting foot into a classroom, teachers need to know the constituent elements of the writing process and have a sound understanding of the mechanical aspects of language at the sentence level – including grammar, syntax and punctuation – that are deployed in different kinds of texts.”

Teachers also need fine-grained knowledge of the writing ability expected of students at different stages, and strategies to assess it, the report noted.

For Chalwell, the school’s ongoing project comes down to “really honouring the expertise of each subject teacher”.

“And the final element is enriching assessment and programming practices so that teachers are thinking carefully about how do they measure quality writing within their subject, and how do they make space in their programs for that,” he says.